NuSphere MySQL: Free Beer in a Tall Glass - page 3

Integrated web development in a box.

April 16, 2001

By
Scott Courtney

NuSphere, taken as a company, seems to take the notion of Open Source
pretty seriously. Not only is the source code of their MySQL
distribution open (as it would need to be to include things like
Apache and MySQL), but this company has also contributed to the MySQL
software team an important piece of technology (called
"Gemini") for transactions and row-level locking. This is
evidence of NuSphere's attempt to be a good citizen in the
open source community.

The folks at NuSphere have a good idea, and they have in
effect done for the middleware tier what Linux distributions have done
for the operating system tier. It would be nice to see an integrated
Open Source search engine tool, and perhaps a WebDAV-aware HTML
editing tool, in a future release. Even without these items, though,
NuSphere is useful enough to be worth considering for business
oriented server deployments. It is reliable, easy to install, and a
genuine improvement over the equivalent component-by-component
installation methods. The downside of this business model is that
distributions often include many of these same Open Source tools as
part of their standard installation, so trying to add NuSphere later
may do more harm than good or may not add much value in some
situations. In others, especially where the system administrator is
new to Linux or UNIX, NuSphere could be a great boost to admin
productivity. NuSphere does not relieve the system administrator of
the need to think -- it just takes away some of the grunt work.

Overall, I found NuSphere MySQL to work well and to be a useful suite
of middleware for Linux server deployment, though its close ties to
the Red Hat distribution's quirks impair its ease of use on other
systems slightly. Whether or not it is worth its $299 price tag will
depend on who is being asked. $299 is a lot to pay for just getting
free beer pre-poured into a tall glass, and indeed a Linux wiz who is
comfortable compiling large programs from source tarball may not want
NuSphere and its fancy browser interfaces getting in the way for a
small number of servers. But that same person, confronted with the
need to build and manage a couple dozen servers -- some of which are
located at the other end of a large building -- might find the remote
GUI installation to be extremely valuable. Those who are new to Linux
and who need to have a small e-commerce site online quickly will
definitely find NuSphere a worthwhile purchase.